This article explores the translocal hybrid activism surrounding two demonstrations triggered by a violent altercation between antifascists and neo‐Nazis in Malmö in March 2014. It maps the appearance and spread of the hashtag that underpinned this activism: #KämpaShowan. It also considers how the hashtag was articulated, adopted and adapted by different activists in ways that led to the emergence of a new hashtag: #KämpaMalmö. It shows how the action frames foregrounded by #KämpaShowan stimulated its translocal diffusion but were also criticised by local activists who in turn tried to relocalise the energy behind the hashtag and shift its associated action frames. The article thus reveals how antifascist activists might respond to far‐right violence with social media tactics that attract broader publics and break the isolation often caused by more confrontational street politics. It also highlights how these tactics can stretch across geographical scales involving processes of relocalisation as much as translocalisation.
Neoliberal urban governance is often framed as a break with the social statecraft of the postwar period. If we approach social government as a specific mode of biopolitical population politics, neoliberal reforms can instead be understood as re‐articulating the welfarist version of postwar social planning. In this article, I analyze how social urban government can become the basis of neoliberal planning through a study of the Swedish city of Malmö, which has shifted its approach from emblematic Scandinavian social democratic welfare urbanism to a particular kind of neoliberal planning. Malmö is a city where distinctions between desirable and unwanted populations are produced by municipal social planning that concerns itself with accumulating human resources. Postwar social planning technologies are thus re‐articulated as the basis for making space competitive for certain residents. This mode of planning is described as a type of ‘social neoliberalism’, which, instead of circumscribing neoliberal economics, extends the reach of neoliberalism into social government. This study suggests that calls for a return to social planning need to be complicated by accounts of how social government itself has been remade by neoliberal reforms. It also points out how the divisions produced by social neoliberalism expose powerful fault lines that reveal a terrain of political struggle.
The public memory of the social democratic welfare state in Sweden often emphasizes housing, but in fact post-war planning was far more diverse. One asset which postwar planning developed over time was a landscape that materialized a range of different concerns over welfare. Even today, the impressive investments in recreational facilities and green spaces made during the high point of welfarist planning in Sweden still provides the backbone of Sweden's recreational infrastructure and areas for outdoor leisure and play. This paper highlights 'leisure planning' as a forgotten aspect of the postwar decades, and argues that the relationship between urban planning and leisure planning speaks to the patchwork character of the welfare landscape and explains why it remains elusive or even invisible in the current debate. We illustrate the making of welfare landscapes by analyzing developments in Upplands Väsby municipality, focusing on the complex interplay between leisure planning and urban planning from the 1950s to the 1980s.
This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People's Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People's Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park's past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process. Established by the city's social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People's Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People's Park's past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.
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